For your first year you're ok. A couple three thoughts: 1. Heads will store longer..much longer than single cloves. You should get 4-6 months storage life from your German Whites and Leningrad's IF stored in the 50s or a bit below with good air circulation and reasonably dry air. Hopefully you have a dry basement with a cool wall or end. If you have the space it is best to store your garlic single or double layered (for air circulation), off the floor, in a dark area. Oh yes..snip off the stalks when they are paper dry before storing. You don't want to bring any bugs inside or have momma get after you for shattered stalks on her floor. 2. Aside from freezing think about peeling/slicing the cloves and drying them. They'll be good for soups/stews and an occasional Xmas gift. 3. Make a point of checking/looking-in/moving your garlic around a bit once a month or so. While "sprouted" garlic is excellent to eat. If or when a good amount starts to sprout best consider drying or freezing. 4. Don't be too tight with your larger cloves..consider setting aside 60 or so heads for 2012. Also think about adding one or two new varieties. Just a thought..see what Karen & Mike at We Grow Garlic have up in Wisconsin: http://www.wegrowgarlic.com/catalog/.

You can always dry or freeze the garlic. Doesn't necessarily have to be stored fresh. Hardneck garlic definitely doesn't store for very long in the fresh state. I've got some hanging in my garage right now that are wanting to grow. The softnecks that have been under the same conditions are fine for now and will be for months. I wonder if the more stable way for me to keep it would have been to either leave it in the ground and dig as needed or to re-plant the harvested bulbs in fall, including the bulbs I really need for cooking. Keeping them in the ground would not be ideal. At the very least the bulb/clove wrappers will rot away. Plus they will start to regrow in fall. Rodney

Melissia, There are different ways to do it. Some people, for example, wash it after harvest and others only brush off the dirt with their hands. Some trim back the greens and roots fairly soon after harvest and others don't. Some trim them a lot and some trim them a little and others don't trim them much at all. Some hang it to dry while others spread it out on screens or wire racks, or even on tabletops covered with several layers of newspaper (to absorb any moisture so it doesn't become trapped between the bulb and the table). I think that what you do to cure your garlic often is determined by your soil and by how wet or how dry your garlic is when harvested. Ideally, you would withhold water that last couple of weeks to the garlic can dry down some on its own right before you harvest it, but in some parts of Oklahoma that have heavy May and June rains, that is not always possible. When I harvest garlic, I usually brush off the dirt by hand if it is dry. If it is fairly moist, I let it dry for a day and brush off the dirt that has dried. If there still is a lot of dirt, I brush it off every day. My father taught me to never wash onions, garlic or potatoes with water after harvesting them because he felt it lengthened their curing time and shortened their storage time. (When I was a little kid, I couldn't understand why he stored "dirty potatoes" no matter how many times he told me. I just wanted to wash them!) Thus, I hate to use water because the wrappers get wet and sometimes shrivel or even can mildew if there is high humidity. Sometimes I use a little vegetable scrub brush from my kitchen to gently brush off stubborn dirt. I normally cure mine by laying them on wire racks in 100% shade---you don't want direct sun or dew/rainfall on it after it is harvested. The amount of time I cure it varies depending on how wet or dry the garlic was when harvested and also depending on how humid the air is. This year, it's been REALLY humid, so the curing time will be longer rather than shorter. It can vary from a week or two if the garlic and the air are really pretty dry to start out with or three weeks or more if the garlic and soil were pretty wet and the air remains humid. In really wet years, I have cured it endlessly...probably 4 to 6 weeks....because it had a high water content when harvested and high humidity remained in the air constantly. To store it, you want to keep it in moderate humidity out of direct sunlight and at moderate temperatures. Some years I have stored it on wire shelves in my pantry. My pantry is dark and cool as it sits under an interior stairway in the very center of the house. Other years, I have stored it tied in bundles and hanging from storage shelves in my tornado shelter, which doubles as a root cellar. It has really cool temperatures, decent humidity and is dark and dry so it is an ideal place to store garlic, onions, potatoes and they last forever when stored in there. The daytime highs in the summer still stay mostly in the 70s in the tornado shelter, so it is a great storage space. If you don't have room for a lot of garlic in your pantry, anywhere in the house that the temperature and humidity stay at a fairly constant level is good. In my house, the floor of an upstairs storage closet works well for interior storage too because it is in the very center of the house so its temperature/humidity stay fairly constant. You can store it in net bags, in doubled brown paper bags, in bundles tied or braided togther and hanging from a shelf, or in a terra cotta storage crock or flower pot covered with a lid. When I move it from curing to storage, I do clip off much of the roots, but I leave a somewhat longer stem on it than you'll find with grocery storage garlic...maybe an inch or two. Remember to save enough to replant in the fall, or you can replant small cloves right after you harvest. I do that pretty often. The stuff I replant won't do much right after it is replanted, but it keeps me from 'forgetting' to plant garlic in fall because I'm too busy harvesting and putting up other crops. People who have high soil moisture level might not have success with replanting right after harvest, but it has worked for me every time I've done it. Properly cured garlic that is stored at medium humidity and moderate interior temperatures (not wildly varying temps like you'd have in a garage, barn or shed in OK in the summer) will last for months and months. I find it lasts a lot longer without sprouting than most grocery store garlic. You can grow whatever you want in the area where you had garlic, harvest it and then replant garlic there in the autumn. I usually put fall tomatoes in that spot and then plant garlic there after they have been removed. I like to add compost to the spot before the garlic goes back in, especially since I have clay soil and drainage is always an issue. Dawn

Personally, after setting some aside for fresh use, I dehydrate the majority of my garlic. To do so, I slice large cloves into 3-4 pieces, and cut smaller cloves in half lengthwise. For hard neck garlics, I peel after cutting off the root & halving; the skins virtually fall off at that point. For smaller cloves (such as most of the soft neck varieties), I de-root & halve the cloves, and dehydrate with the skin on. After drying, vigorous shaking in a container will release the skins, and they can be winnowed away. You can process a large amount of garlic this way in a fairly short time. And to think, I used to spend hours peeling those cloves before drying! :-0 You could probably use the same skin-on drying method to process large quantities of hard neck garlic... I may try that this year, since the crop promises to be large. The garlic "chips" store for a year or more in a sealed container (I use freezer bags), even at room temperature. We grind them as needed for fresh garlic powder, and use them whole for cooking. There seems to be less loss of flavor over time than I observed when I tried freezing cloves. Interestingly, the chips retain their shape in cooked dishes, and after absorbing flavors from the other ingredients, become quite delicious.